Letter from DC: The Declining Importance of Gay

The new mantra? “They’re queer, they’re here. Yawn….”

A seismic event occurred on the Senate Floor this past
Monday night. By an 80-13 vote, the
Senate confirmed the appointment of J. Paul Oetken to serve as a federal judge
for the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York, one of the most
influential benches in the nation with primary judicial oversight over Wall
Street.

The action was seismic not because an Obama appointee actually
made it through the confirmation process relatively quickly - a rarity. It was seismic not because the appointee
garnered the unanimous support of Democrats despite the appointee’s very
pro-business credentials as the head litigator at Cablevision, a much-maligned
cable, entertainment, and sports behemoth.

The Senate’s action was seismic because the Senate
confirmed, for the first time, an openly gay man to serve on the federal
bench. There already is an
“acknowledged” lesbian on the federal bench, but her sexuality was a carefully
avoided issue when she was confirmed during the Clinton Administration.

(Plus, the idea of two women together is hot and not the
same for those wigged out by male homosexuality. After all, “straight” porn always has a girl
on girl scene so it’s not gay.)

There were no floor objections, no apocalyptic warnings of
the homosexual agenda, and perhaps most surprisingly, no accompanying
fundraising drive by social conservatives to cash in on what has been lucrative
red meat in the past.

Nobody seemed to care that the dude likes to bed down with the
dude Oetken introduced as his partner to the Senate Judiciary Committee during
his March confirmation hearings. That in
itself is pretty seismic.

Ardent social conservatives in the Senate voted aye. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who in 2004 warned:
“The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area
across this country” and whose “agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom
that we face today” aided and abetted in that infiltration and threat with a
“yes” vote.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who compared gay marriage to “your
neighbor marrying a box turtle” and decried a US Supreme Court decision in
“Lawrence v. Texas” that de-criminalized consensual sex between adults did not
seem to care that Oetken co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of the National
Gay and Lesbian Law Association in that same case. The Texan voted in the
affirmative.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) saw fit to comment on a NJ Supreme
Court decision on marriage equality in its state while running for office in Tennessee,
deriding “yet one more example of activist, liberal judges creating bad law
from the bench.” He then gave thumbs up to a judge that will have the choice of
marriage to his boyfriend this Sunday provided by his state legislature.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) - another town crier on the
threat to my own marriage by Steve and Bill (native Iowans, no less) down the
street rather than all the fine women at Jaleo - applauded Oetken’s Iowan
roots, saying it “prepared him for his future success in New
York.”

In all, 26 Senate Republicans did not bat an eye in
providing a lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful benches in the
country to an unabashed member of Lambda Legal, the ACLU LGBT Project, the
Human Rights Campaign, GAYLAW, and the National LGBT Bar Association. Nine of
them just voted no with nary a word of objection. There was a golden opportunity to make some
serious hay and not a whimper or even morning after pushback.

It was one of the finest and most honorable acts by the U.S.
Senate in recent memory: to affirm one’s professional and legal credentials
without regard to sexuality and with no drama. It also affirmed
that body’s intentional mission to be the more deliberative, and less
reactionary, of Congress’ two chambers.

The Senate oversaw the dismantling of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell” policy of the Pentagon and held hearings just this Wednesday on repealing
the “Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).” In
contrast, House Republican leadership hired outside counsel to defend DOMA in
the courts after the Justice Department decided overt inequality and exclusion
was no longer legally sustainable.

The new mantra? “They’re queer, they’re here. Yawn .” (Even USA
Today, our vanilla snapshot of American mores, ran a cover story this past
Wednesday on the lack of interest in the sexuality of a growing number of gay
political candidates.)

You can see that emerging reasonableness in the Senate with
its bipartisan “Gang of Six” that is working with Obama to revive the “grand
plan” of addressing the nation’s toxic debt and its immediate need to address
the debt ceiling crisis. Meanwhile, the
House Republicans are driving a “cut, cap, and balance” legislative initiative
that is openly acknowledged as having absolutely no chance of moving past the
House.

It was a good week for the Senate. And while the issue of LGBT equality is far
from resolved, and the nation is still too perilously close to an economic
calamity because of partisan intransigence, there were glimmers of hope. Hope that the grown-ups in the Senate could
lead the children from the House to compromise and resolution and to see that a
really smart lawyer that happens to bat from the other side of the plate would
make a good judge, not simply a gay judge.

Marc Osgoode Smith has covered – and participated in - Washington DC policy circles for more than two decades as a journalist covering media and as an association and think tank executive. Smith now enjoys his role as a “cultural observer” of DC Politics and the people that engage in them.